Serenity is the Hallway Hero

I kept a list of student names and spellings from the classes I used to substitute teach when I first moved to Missoula.  Brock, Brodee, Cody, Elmira, Camas and Willow were some of my favorites.  Characters from a Larry McMurtry novel, small towns found in the wilds of Wyoming or abstract concepts revived by the now grandparents of the 60's.  Only West of the Mississippi would you consistently have a roll call with a boy named Earl.  And a girl named Serenity can be a hallway hero.

My niece is named Wren and I adore her and her name.  It seems to be rather onomatopoetic when you say it for it easily flies out of your mouth and you find yourself smiling when you say her name.  Despite our distance and lack of time spent hanging out on a daily basis, Wren and I are rather fond of each other.  Perhaps it might be because we have a similar sense of spirit.  Perhaps it might be because she has a friend named Emily she likes who lives near by.  

What I do know is that last Valentine's day Wren and her mom were in the post office sending off Valentines' to friends and family when Wren said, 
"I want to send Emily a card."  
"Emily who?" asked her mom.
"Emily Montana." (which sounds pretty darn cool, like some struggling country western singer who spends too much time not singing.)  And so, Wren put together a card for me, which this picture does not do justice, but is framed and hung in my bathroom.  It felt too artful and alive to just be left on my fridge to fold or fade into the year placed under some magnet.  I wanted to hold that spirit all year long.  I wanted to feel in the random St. Patrick stickers, smily faces, reindeer and pieces of cake a sense of love and joy.  Placed just so with so much well, spirit and such a sense of unabashed delight. 

Last Valentine's day for me was not a memorable day in the state of romantic love.  Perhaps what was memorable was it was so full of almost every other type of love: familial, hopeful, renewal, longing and of course, loss of love.  I'm confident if you wikipediaed love, you would find plenty of more types, but what resonated with me with this card was a specific type of love.  A love that comes from a personal place in our hearts, regardless of how old we are,  let's just call it a love of light.  Call it lightness of being, call it joy, call it whatever you want, but hopefully you call it.  I believe we all possess this love or are capable of being surprised by where we might find it.  For me, it is a card thickly coated with every holiday of the year stickers, placed in a manner of a four year old's artful mind.

I only recently framed this card out of the desire to remind myself of being able to bring light, or delight into my daily life.  November can hang heavy.  Can make you forget about the sun.  And it is during these dark hallways of days that you need a torch, need some sort of light regardless of how faint to follow.  It is during these days I have needed this card the most.  I am sure all of us have some totem of joy we follow. And most of the time for me it is art or poetry.  It is the poetry of Jack Gilbert that I turn to for cerebral joy when I feel heavy in my heart.

Last night, thanks to the post by fellow poets on Facebook, I found out Jack Gilbert died.  (Again, I just think we should all it Face It.)  If you don't know Jack Gilbert, please google him.  No, google his poetry.  Even better yet, google videos where you can hear his voice break almost in every poem he reads, as if his words were so heavy with emotion but so giving with light.  

He had won the prized Yale Younger Poets award in 1962, thought to be this next handsome man of yes, literary fame if there is such a thing, but Jack chose to live in Europe.  Chose to write a book of poems every ten years, chose to live more than he taught.  Wrote more about the terrible beauties of this world not under the guise of shame or darkness, but rather delight.  Or as the article in the New York Times said of his work yesterday, "..and their (his poems) embrace of life as a big, messy possibility, his poems were for many readers both serious and accessible, connecting to their own feelings of having to endure in a often cruel, unfair world."

But there is more there in his work.  In the poetry of Jack Gilbert, suffering was not something to endure, but to accept with a smile.  He loved this world so much, maybe too much for our rational minds to understand. Here are a few lines from his poem, "A Brief for the Defense" found in his book, Refusing Heaven,  

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of  their deprivation.

We must risk delight.  We can do without pleasure,

but not delight.  Not enjoyment.  We must have 

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world.   To make injustice the only 

measure  of our attention  is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give thanks that the end had  magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

And I believe to risk knowing there is sorrow, but to risk holding delight despite it all allows us to live with our hearts as much as our minds.  To risk our ability to have delight and joy is to risk love.  And the greatest risk is truly believing we are worth it.  To hear our names as the hallway heros of love.  To be happy with our sorrow and give thanks that our hearts can still bring joy.  Despite everything.  Despite losing Jack we have gained his words. 

Here's a poem from the same book, Refusing Heaven. 

Enjoy.

The Reinvention of Happiness

I remember how I'd lie on my roof

listening to the fat violinist

below in the sleeping village

play Schubert so badly, so well.